


vivisection

by Anonymous



Category: Ancient History RPF, Masters of Rome - Colleen McCullough, Spartacus (1960)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mild Gore, Sickfic, is it a hurt/comfort if the person who does the hurting also does the comforting, is this a sickfic?, no beta we die like athenians during the sack of athens, nothing happens, sulla is as nice as he can be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-13 07:47:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29648076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Crassus avoids Sulla and Sulla gets angry about it.
Relationships: Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix/Marcus Licinius Crassus
Kudos: 4
Collections: Anonymous Fics





	vivisection

**Author's Note:**

> This work was inspired by the quote "There is an important distinction that must be drawn between the words dissection and vivisection, a distinction that appears to be lost on you" from Kitty Horrorshow's game, ANATOMY. I've been sitting on this fic for a while because it was supposed to be something very yikes and unfortunate for Crassus, as many of my fics with him and Sulla are, but Tchaikovsky's first string quartet took this in a different direction. I hope you enjoy lol

The afternoon sunlight was stroked by the drooping leaves of the soft willow tree hanging over the veranda. The shadows ran up and down bare legs, one outstretched on a cushioned stool, the other bent at the knee, the tapered foot accustomed to the hot terracotta tiles that baked under the sun. A cohort of ants in an orderly line marched past a large toe. The chair was wooden, an old family heirloom from a bloodline that was not his, symbols carved on the back that he did not recognise. The chair arms were just low enough for him to rest his hands in his lap, nursing a handful of correspondences that he never got back to. 

Every day, he took them and reread them, trying to come up with satisfactory responses filled with his staples of cunning and ensnaring friendliness. But he always found himself too aloof to come up with anything suitable. Now, the oldest of the letters were tainted with dust stains, and marks of his sweating fingers, or warped from a spot of spilt wine. 

The water in the large pond murmured and stirred. He could see ripples bruising the surface where fish scattered beneath, or from frogs, who croaked in the reeds. Ducks paddled from end to end, dipping their bills in the water to preen and groom. A white ibis with long, spindly black legs wadded through the shallows and, from the tall grass, a loon let out a mournful call. 

Once upon a time, many years ago, the pond would have never been so quiet with him nearby. Loud thunks of river rocks crashing into the surface, the thrashing of a lithe, little body churning through the water, ducks quacking angrily as they were chased away from the peaceful banks. He remembered it well. He remembered dragging himself out of the water, covered in leaves and broken reeds, and running to the very same veranda, the mud on his feet protecting him from the hot ground, eating his weight in figs and roasted fish until all he could do was fall back onto the warm tile under the vines growing on the trellis ceiling and drift off to sleep. 

He was close to participating in old habits. Albeit, not fighting in the mud, or hunting for frogs, but dozing in the heat of the afternoon. He slowly, cautiously shifted in his chair, hissing quietly as the movement tugged at the tender edges of a deep gash embedded in the side of his abdomen. He reached down experimentally and pressed against the bandage, hoping that he didn’t jostle it so much that it would bleed. It was hot to the touch. Burning hot. Hot enough to make the red tiles seem fit enough to cool a glass of water. 

He sighed, resigned, and returned his hand to his lap. There had been little improvement since the day he got the wound, courtesy of his own countrymen. His physician had been trying numerous different poultices and herbs, crushed in a mortar and drained into the gash. All had resulted in poor reactions and the same, red, swollen cut, accented with the white of his fat and the pink of his muscle, occasionally filling with thick pus. 

If he were a snapped off reed, floating on the water, the wound was what set him adrift, steadily sailing to wherever the warm breeze and stirring currents willed. Sulla had prohibited him from rejoining meetings and appearances until the wound was, at the very least, beginning to close. How long ago had that been? Rome was still standing, he saw the sea of buildings from his bedroom window. Clearly, his reigning band had maintained order without him. He patiently waited for his wound to heal, but what once had seemed like an endearing sign of care now felt like doldrums abandoning him on the cruel sea. 

The letters were unanswered. The atrium was empty. The grounds were quiet. His ambition resting on the bottom of the pond as if it were trapped beneath those river rocks.

“My god,” came a voice, quiet and mild, piercing the heavy silence as easily as the ibis walked through water, “you’ve grown lax.” Hands curled around his neck, threateningly; had they held a knife, his blood would be shimmering on the tiles.

He looked up at once, his fatigued body aching at the suddenness. His pulse began to thunder, which was surely apparent to the rough hands resting on his throat. “Imperator,” he gaped. 

“Hello, Marcus.” Sulla’s bright blond hair was blindingly golden in the intense sun, the light against his flyaway strands seemingly giving him a mane. He was every bit a lion, too. Broad shouldered and powerful, a chilling threat even at his most relaxed and docile. He moved like one as he came to sit down beside Crassus, pulling up a chair. His movements were silent, muscles flexing as he took a chair, sitting down tactfully, without any sigh or abandon. “I apologise for coming to you unannounced. I haven’t heard from you in some time. You can imagine my concern.”

“It’s very kind of you to think of me.”

Sulla’s blue eyes dissected him. “Of course I think of you. Your absence has only made you more present in my mind, not less. I would never let you go so easily. No,” he said, and punctuated it as he leaned back in the chair easily, looking out at the pond. “Even if you were bested by your wound, I would besiege the Underworld for your return. I’m not done with you, yet.”

“I take it, then,” said Crassus, struggling to work past his cottonmouth, “that you have more work for me.” It was humiliating to remember a time not so long ago when he was always ravenous for more of Sulla, and so envious of anyone that had his attention for even a moment that the jealousy was strong enough to rouse him to kill a man. Now, he felt like a hare quivering before the eagle. He was out of his depth, his lack of ambition no longer allowing him to keep up by Sulla’s side. 

“In due time. Part of why I came is to tell you about those plans. I was sorry to make them without your blessing, but, as I said, I haven’t heard from you. Which leads me to why else I am here. How are you, Marcus Licinius? How are you healing?” 

He didn’t need to think. “Quite well.” It was, of course, a bold-faced lie that fled from his lungs before he could even consider the consequences. Old habits die hard. As panicked as he was before Sulla, his desire to return to his side was as natural and thoughtless as breathing.

Sulla’s eyes gleamed with interest. “That’s very good to hear.” It wasn’t praise, but it still stroked Crassus’s quivering ego and he glowed under it anyway. “I’m no physician, but may I see?” They both knew that he wasn’t asking. There was no sense in panicking before the inevitable, knowing how easily Sulla was going to discover Crassus's lie. Crassus hesitated before he sat up from the chair. He winced as he stretched awkwardly, reaching for the ties of his tunic. Sulla’s fingers met his and pushed his hand away. He untied the knot and pushed the fabric forward, towards Crassus’s tanned shoulders. He shrugged out, his chest bare, his wound throbbing lightly at the exertion.

He unravelled the bandages, damp with sweat, until Crassus’s stomach was bare, the red imprints from the bandages raised and tender, causing his hair to prickle in the air. There was a rectangular patch of soft, off-white linen pressed against the wound itself. Gingerly, Sulla took a corner of it and started to pull it away. The serous fluid constantly draining from him had dried and stuck the linen to the open flesh. Crassus exhaled sharply as Sulla continued to pull at it, tearing the wound open again once more. Sulla shushed him, pulling it all the way off, exposing the angry red beneath and the blooms of blood that were beginning to well out again. He studied it and then raised his hand, running his index finger all along the gash, from side to side. “Marcus Licinius,” he prompted.

“Yes?” said Crassus, feeling ill.

“I was there when you were nearly gutted, and I stood over the shoulder of the physician as he mended you best he could. Had you been in a worse state, this now might be an improvement, but, such as it is, it is not.” No matter how well Sulla presented himself as a man of simple extremes, he was still a volatile creature and no matter how hard Crassus tried, he could not read him. “Is your doctor a fool, I wonder, or perhaps your wound wrought by some kind of curse, or if you spend your nights like Penelope, picking away at whatever progress your humors made?” His finger, cool on his inflamed skin, ran along the gash once again. “Which is it?”

“None of them, Sulla. I haven’t the slightest clue why…”

“What sort of excuse is that?” His tone was flippant and casual. Before Crassus could come up with a response, the general went on. “You’re so cheap. Always balancing your books and chasing down what’s owed to you. Is this the maximum price you’re willing to pay for your country? Have you decided that the profit you’ve turned is not enough to cover the expenses?” He prodded the raw skin to one side of the cut ruthlessly. Crassus hissed, and his head swooned. “Well, I’m here collecting what’s owed to me . You did save my life, and for that I am grateful, but that only repaid me restoring your family to its former glory. Our business isn’t quite done yet, and I need you alive and strong still. It irritates me when you get in the way of what I want.”

“You misrepresent me,” said Crassus, his tongue loosened by heat of the sun and the steady flow of his own blood dripping on the tile after Sulla toyed with the fragile clots.

His blue eyes narrowed. “Is that so?”

“I have no control over this,” he gestured to himself. 

Sulla scoffed. “Buy yourself a new doctor, have a surgeon sew you back together, get bedrest instead of lounging by a swamp in this damnable heat. At the very least you could have written to me, sent for me,  _ something. _ ”

Crassus floundered. “I didn’t think that you cared.”

He could see Sulla’s jaw clench and unclench at that. It was impossible to parse the look in his wild eyes. To discern anything from them was to look at the indigo deep of the sea and say just how far down the seafloor was. Even wondering for too long was a dangerous game, but he played it anyway. Crassus treaded in those eyes, splashing in the waves that tried to devour him whole. Sulla was quiet for a long while, even glancing out at the pond to take in the pair of herons skimming on the water surface. The water babbled suddenly as the unseen fish stirred below, out of reach of the birds. One of the birds dipped its bill into the water and unearthed some kind of writhing lizard. “I ought to rip your liver out and feed it to the bullfrogs,” the general mused quietly. 

“That would help neither of us.”

“It would calm me down.”

“Then I welcome you to it.”

Sulla looked back at him immediately, but to the souring wound rather than to meet his eyes. There was a strange, twisting expression on his lips, so incoherent that Crassus tensed, thinking that Sulla was actually considering it. That he would open him further, shoving his fist in his diaphragm and grabbing a handful of his vital organs, tearing them away from tissue and bone and flinging them into the pond with all his might. The pair of herons would be soaked red as they fled the barrage, and the pond would run white with the fish and vultures devouring his organ.

Instead, he reached for Crassus’s lap and took the letters from him, tossing them aside. He bunched up the bandage and pressed it against Crassus, who shied away in pain. “Hold firm to that,” ordered Sulla, standing up from his chair, stepping in the growing puddle of blood without even a glance at it. And just like that, the dictator decided that he no longer wished to torment his general. Whether he was disinterested or had something else on his mind, Crassus could never tell. He did as he was told and held the bandages to himself, watching Sulla with a similar anxiety as one watching a wolf at a distance. 

“I take it you’ve had enough of the heat.” The sun was wilting to the west, casting an early evening orange hue to the world, like the last blazes of Rome before the sun fell for its nightly respite. The shadows of the trellis were growing, the buzzing of the cicadas growing unbearable. 

“There are a great many things that I have had quite enough of.” He took Crassus by the shoulder as he helped him stand. He rose slowly. Stars spun behind his eyes and his feet felt clumsy and unstable on the tiles. He didn’t realise how he had suffered as he sat there, slowly bleeding out, only remaining cognizant due to Sulla’s presence. The poor state of his body caught up with him quickly. They walked along the path, Sulla strolling and Crassus staggering, of madrones and laurels leading back to the main road. It seemed like a formidable march back up the gentle incline to the colorful house situated among cool oaks and swaying willows. Crassus degenerated quickly along that dusty, parched path. He was well enough to walk on his own, and then to walk with Sulla gripping his elbow, and then Sulla holding him up, tugging him along, looking on with disinterest as Crassus stopped to pant and spit in the unsatisfying shade. He stumbled and swooned into Sulla’s side.

“I’ll carry you.” 

Crassus’s trembling hand shielded his sensitive eyes from the sun. “What for?”

“You aren’t fit to walk the rest of the way,” said Sulla.

“I am.”

Frustrated and uninterested in an argument, Sulla punched Crassus directly against his wound. Crassus cried out a strangled howl, voice breaking and knees crumpling. With a grunt, Sulla caught him and awkwardly drew him up into his arms. “Meet me halfway,” he said, strained. Crassus, breathing hard through the remnants of that brutal shock of pain, threw his clammy arm over Sulla’s neck, his bloody hand staining the man’s wheat hair. The rough swaying with Sulla’s gait and the limpness of his limbs did nothing to quell the vertigo that wracked Crassus’s head. His body was soaked with sweat and blood, and the humiliation of it all made it that much more unbearable.

It was hardly reminiscent of the night when he first got the cursed cut, when his blood sprayed out onto the smoothed and eroded cobblestones leading up to the Capitoline. He never could have known that the clumsy blade of a poor assassin would make its mark thusly. That night, he had walked himself to the surgeon, the adrenaline in his veins much more potent than his weaknesses ever could be. It had been enough to shake Sulla from the pitiful indifference he handled Crassus with, the aloofness in his eyes replaced with shock and pride and his own genre of terrible endearment. That look, the feeling of those eyes on him, on his blood spilled out on ancient ground, was enough for Crassus to seek such pain and suffering out again. Somehow along that path of devotion, he tripped and found himself obsolete and ruined, a child’s toy left out on the street having been broken beyond repair. If that look of pride was on Sulla’s face again as he carried Crassus through the arcade of painted columns, Crassus was too far gone to see it. His face might have been a mirage in that heat, the solar face of Apollo marred with heat waves.

“You are much more trouble than you’re worth,” Sulla muttered above him, jostling him as he renewed his slipping grip. The shade of the atrium was holy and his eyes closed, dazed. He could hear Sulla distantly barking orders. A rush of cold trembled through his body, worsening as he felt him falling slowly. “Such an unspectacular burden, and for what? This forsaken city has a stronger sense of self-preservation than you do, just begging to be annexed.” The clink of metal tools echoed far away, the smell of pungent herbs, the taste of them on his tongue. Tepid, clammy water ran over his skin. His head spun every so often, denoting the passage of time even though Crassus could not tell how many minutes or hours had passed. “I have no idea why I keep you around, why I come and rescue you anyway.” Hands prodded him, pressed against his forehead, his throat. Pain was familiar, and the stifling feeling of being bound again even more so. After some time, the pain subsided, the voices quieted, the cicadas continued to buzz far away, nightingales calling, the air growing so thin and cool that the crashing of waves could be heard. A single hand, fingers gentle and still stained with blood, pressed against his face, thumb swiping over the apple of his cheek before he was abandoned entirely by the touch.


End file.
